Blue steel. Cat couldn't scratch it.

Ron Howard (the sweet kid from Happy Days) does Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) from behind the director's chair. Happy Days meet E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)? Not really. Although much of Cocoon's iconography (the UFOs, the aliens) has been stolen from Steven Spielberg, this is one of those movies that leaves one with a warm glowing feeling after leaving the cinema – and it wasn't the poor air-conditioning...

And who cannot be warmed by a tale of a bunch of loveable geriatrics who grow younger because of their proximity to alien pods stored nearby and who are finally taken away by those same aliens? This movie is also commendable for featuring probably the only sex scene between an alien and an earthling (Steve Guttenberg of Police Academy fame) - even though the alien is Raquel Welch's daughter and is every bit as sexy...

By the way, this movie made enough money to warrant a sequel in which the geriatrics returns to earth on some lame pretext - not the point of the exercise really.